LA CIENEGA AREA

James Doolin has so upped the emotional ante of his paintings since he first painted a meticulous bird’s-eye view of a Santa Monica intersection that his work is almost unrecognizable. Though he still peers down on the city from dizzying vantage points, his recent paintings have more in common with American Regionalism around the ‘30s than with earlier Doolin. The change may seem retrogressive to those who catch a moldy whiff of backsliding into history and hear the strident preaching of a social critic, but Doolin’s dramatic move is definitely for the better.

In a show of oils from 1985 and 1986, he comes up with some knock-out images of Los Angeles: a wide angle view of the freeway crunch as seen through a windshield, a pedestrian bridge spanning speeding traffic, a downtown intersection populated with trash pickers, possessed evangelists, drunken bums and all manner of devastated loners. He heightens the drama of these scenes with vertiginous plunges, fish-eye heights and eerie light suffused through nearly lurid color. Light hovers in little pools of greenish matter or stretches across deep yellow horizons. Smoggy skies are graded from rusty brown to deep violets.

Rather like a theatrical light designer, Doolin sometimes reworks a theme, changing the mood through color. The skid row street corner is aptly called an “Oasis” in a painting that vaguely recalls Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and radiates from a fast-food stand. The same location, nearly stripped of people and saturated with cars, becomes a moody, blue-gray urban wasteland in another oil titled “Downtown.”

Doolin is clearly an accomplished technician, a clever dramatist and a keen observer. Now if he can just resist the urge to caricature and to deliver moral lessons through images of broken wine bottles, he is sure to create a view of Los Angeles as wise as it is captivating. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Nov. 8.)